Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Staunton, February 28 – One of the
most powerful constraints on demonstrations and protests in the Russian
Federation today is the assumption that such actions do not have an impact on
the powers that be and thus participation in them involves high risks with low
chances of making a difference.

Most Russians and most specialists
on the Soviet Union and Russia today believe that the top leaders make their
decisions exclusively in terms of their own interests without regard to the
actions of the population.Indeed,
Russian history since 1953 has been written and accepted as the record of what
particular leaders wanted, with the attitudes and actions of the people.

Thus, Khrushchev moved to
de-Stalinize to protect himself and his comrades a recrudescence of terror,
Brezhnev pursued policies intended to avoid rocking the boat, Andropov sought
to remobilize the country, and Gorbachev concluded that “we can’t continue to
live like this” and ushered in perestroika, glasnost and the demise of the
Soviet system.

Since 1991, Yeltsin first loosened the
constraints on the population and then began to tighten them again, a process
that his successor, the current Russian president Vladimir Putin is pursuing
with renewed vigor.

No one could or would deny that the
personality and goals of particular leaders were irrelevant to the directions
Moscow has taken. These things are obviously critical.But to say this does not mean that protests
and demonstrations by the population were irrelevant. In many cases, those protests
helped to shape the attitudes of the Kremlin leader.

Once that is understood, it can be
seen that protests and demonstrations in the future may also have a profound
impact on the individual in office even if he is a committed authoritarian like
Putin because anyone interested in maintaining power has to recognize certain
limits to his freedom of action given the reaction, real or likely, of the
population.

In the course of a long essay in
which he considers the evolution of the Putin regime, Yakov Azimandis says that
“the thaw in the 1960s did not come by itself.Many rights and freedoms were won not by Khrushchev’s voluntarist desire
but as the result of a wave of protests and risings, first in Stalin’s camps
and then in Soviet cities (rufabula.com/author/azimandis/1512).

Most people
remember only the Novocherkassk rising in 1962, he says; but there were many
more; and he urges Russians to familiarize themselves with F.A. Kozlov’s
543-page study, Mass Disorders in the
USSR under Khrushchev and Brezhnev (in Russian; Moscow, 3rd edition,
2009. The full text is at eland.ru/dirty/kozlov_massovyie_besporiadki_2010.pdf).

Among them were protests and risings
in Podolsk in 1957, Temirtau in 1959, Kirovabad in 1961, Biysk in 1961, Murod
and Aleksandrov in 1961, Beslan in 1961, Sumgait in 1963, Bronnitsy in 1964, Moscow
in 1966, Frunze in 1967m Chimkent in 1967, Priluki in 1967, Slutsk in 1967, and
Nalchik in 1968, not to mention the many in Gorbachev’s time.

The powers that be were simply “forced”
to make certain concessions to the population and open the way for more working
class people to enter the government, something that is less likely to happen
now, Azimandis says, because “generals have their own children.”As a result, the elite has become “incestuous”
and thus “condemned to collapse.”

The Putin regime “doesn’t want and
cannot renew itself,” he continues, and thus “it is useless to wait for a thaw
or even more a spring.” Russians need to take things into their own hands because
“spring will come when anger breaks out in the hearts of people … No one gives
anyone any rights; they have to be taken.”

That means that Putin’s plans for
the future elections are “good news” for Rusisanns because they show that he no
longer has any room for maneuver. He simply wants to keep power. And that in
turn creates a situation where demonstrations and risings by the population can
have an effect, perhaps one even more powerful than in the 1950s.

Staunton, February 28 – Lies are one
thing; disinformation quite another, as the late Nathalie Grant warned decades
ago. The first can muddy the waters but are typically quickly exposed by anyone
who examines them. They have a far greater and long lasting influence because
the lies are wrapped in facts.

Indeed, one could say that the flood
of lies is nothing but a means to make disinformation more effective because
those who recognize these falsehoods may deceive themselves when it comes to
more carefully constructed narratives of disinformation which are accepted
because so many parts of them are true.

Consequently, identifying such
disinformation and carefully sifting the lies it contains that are surrounded
by facts is a far more important but also far more difficult task than simply
unmasking lies. The latter may make those who do it feel better; but only the
former can protest us against those who deploy disinformation skillfully.

That makes a new article by US-based
Russian journalist Kseniya Kirillova especially important. Indeed, in many
ways, it is a model of the challenge the world faces in dealing with Russian
disinformation and the care that needs to be exercised in exposing and thus
countering it (ru.krymr.com/a/28334404.html).

Last week, she
notes, the Ukrainian media was filled with stories that Ukrainian defense
plants were selling military equipment to Russia.The reports cited the conclusions of the
distinguished Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and even
appeared plausible given that Ukrainian plants had supplied Russian ones before
2014.

Such stories have two target audiences:
Ukrainians who might conclude that their elites were betraying them and their
country out of greed, and Europeans who might conclude that there was no reason
to defend Ukraine or maintain sanctions on Russia for its invasion if the
Ukrainians weren’t willing to prevent such sales.

But the stories, however plausible
and apparently fact-based they appeared to be, were entirely false. Indeed, as
experts at the Kyiv Center for Research on the Army, Conversion and Disarmament
point out, those behind this disinformation did not report accurately even
about what SIPRI did say.

Mikhail Samus, deputy head of the center,
notes that “it is important to understand that SIPRI did not publish precisely the
information” these stories contained. Instead, the stories were based on its
own collective summaries of materials rather than on the actual evidence the
Stockholm institute gathered.

For journalists who choose to rely
on the summaries rather than on the report itself, the stories placed in the
Ukrainian media appear accurate, whereas those who examine the SIPRI study will
see that such conclusions are not only inaccurate but designed to hide what
SIPRI did highlight in its latest report: Russian arms shipments to its forces
in the Donbass and Crimea.

And one Ukrainian journalist,
Aleksandr Demchenko, adds that the way in which SIPRI presented the data it has
on Ukrainian arms sales further confused the situation. The Swedish center
based its findings not on data from the last year but rather for a five-year-period,
from 2012 to 2016, which includes a time when Ukrainian firms did supply
Russian ones.

Moscow is only too pleased to use
such “inaccuracies” to discredit Ukraine in Europe and to hide its own illegal
supply of weapons to its own forces and clients in the Donbass and to
Russian-occupied Crimea. By pushing the inaccurate story of Ukrainian arms
sales at the same time and with the same sources, Moscow at least in part has
achieved its goals.

Exposing this kind of thing, as
Kirillova has done here, is far more difficult and time-consuming that simply
pointing to lies, but it is also far more important. And as she notes, “this
isn’t the first such case” since Russia invaded Ukraine; and it certainly won’t
be the last either there or elsewhere.

Reaction has ranged from the bemused
to the angry, but Andrey Movchan, a Moscow commentator has offered a reflection
on his Facebook page that is one of most profound diagnoses of the nature of
Vladimir Putin’s Russia to appear anywhere so far. Below is a translation of
his complete text (facebook.com/andrei.movchan/posts/1483814595008079).

“Moscow is dealing
with a report about the construction of a Reichstag for a new storming. And it
seems to me,” Movchan
says, “that this is a new universal meme
in the sense that everything that Russia is occupied with today is the
construction of a Reichstag within itself with the goal of then taking it.

“In this metaphor
there is no unnecessary detail and nothing is left out: That is exactly what a
super cargo cult should look like: you erect in the center of yourself
something with the single goal fo then storming it and ritually destroyed.

“Freud should have
called this collective masturbation with a rape fantasy (perhaps he didn’t, I’m
not certain” Movchan continues”). But of all our shortages which we have about,
the main thing that turns out to be is a lack of enemies and victories – and
thus have to turn backward to one from the past symbolized by the Reichstag.

“Bu what is most
horrific is that our excitement reeks of necrophilia. We are not simply
devotees of a cargo cult; we are an anachronism.We can’t even find an enemy for ourselves
from our own era: We are building not a Pentagon, not a mosque in Mosul, not
the palace of Kim Chen Un, not Buckingham Palace, and even not Poroshenko’s
dacha at the worst end.

“No, we are stuck
in the dark middle of the 20th century, like a specter which died
then and is condemned to wander forever in the fields of asphodels among other
specters which died in its time.

“In Dante’s Inferno,
there is a circle for false prophets and false teachers. There, in punishment
for their leading people into pernicious error, they eek out their eternity
with their head turned around toward their backs.

“Are not all of us
already paying for the false teachers who were given birth by Russia in the 20th
century and are we not condemned eternally to pretend that we are moving
forward, with faces turned around on their necks and gazing backward where in
the rear are the increasingly indistinct outlines of the Reichstag?

“We all are trying
to take it yet another time as it recedes ever further from us …”